People on capped broadband. How do you get your games?

wunkley · 11 Oct 2017 at 09:36

Possibly moving soon to an area that doesn't have fibre broadband yet. ADSL over landline is about 1.5mb/sec (EDIT - note the small 'b'. It's as slow as it gets, part of the 5% club of total **** UK broadband, so just not viable.)

EDIT - Speedtest.net result for new house:

However, it has good 4g reception so I'm looking into possibilities of stuff like 4gee or three homefi. However, as its 4g data plans they come with pretty strict data limits, like 40-50GB per month, unless you pay the eye watering £100 a month for EE's new 200GB per month plan.

At the moment I'm on unlimited talk talk fibre, which is great. I know some people still have capped broadband packages, so how do you cope with buying new games these days, when downloads are massive and can wipe out your monthly allowance in one game?

wunkley · 11 Oct 2017 at 10:27

Thanks for the suggestions chaps.

I can see this being a problem. With the amount of updates required these days, patches, etc etc, taking a laptop to a location with good wifi will be far too much hassle.
Getting an ADSL line alongside a 40GB capped 4G plan might be ok, but as a quick example, if I needed to download a 50GB game, which are quite common now, then using the ADSL line at 1.5mb/s would take about 3 days!

I've looked into satellite broadband also, but this is v expensive too, and has caps, but some plans have uncapped allowance between 12am-6am.

wunkley · 11 Oct 2017 at 10:57

Matteysan said:
It'll take about 12 hours to download 50gb at 1.5mb/s how do I know this? I just downloaded 58gb in that time on my 1.5mb/s line.

The ADSL is 1.5mb/s. Not MB/s. Massive massive difference. Its rural broadband. 50gb will take 3 days as its approx only 200KB/sec. Have a look at downloadtimecalculator.com

wunkley · 11 Oct 2017 at 11:30

Tell me more about bonded ADSL, I know nowt about this. Really basic question but will it cost twice as much as basic broadband as it's 2 lines? If it's getting to those costs, so around £50, then I may as well look at EE's 4G home plan that's 200GB/ month cap at £100 a month as it will be very fast and easy all round.

wunkley · 11 Oct 2017 at 11:55

Disco_P said:
Is 1.5mbits an actual speed or an estimate? My parents estimate is 1-2mbits but in reality it's 5-6 mbits.

1.5mbits is the estimate from Samknows.com. I then asked the vendors to run a speedtest.net and it came back with this:

Thing is, where I live now is approx 1.5 miles from the exchange, and before I upgraded to fibre last year (FTTC) I used to get a rock solid 6-7mbits over ADSL2+.
This new house (totally new area) is approx 1.5 miles from its local exchange, exactly the same distance, so I'm wondering why the speeds are so low?
If I could get the same 6mbits over ADSL at the new place that would be fine for a while.